[quote]bigflamer wrote:
I’d like to challenge our resident Bush haters to give the President credit for something. Anything. Let’s see if any of you Bush haters can sack up and be somewhat objective.
Even a Clinton hater such as myself realizes that he had some good qualities and managed to do at least do a few things right.[/quote]
He makes the rest of Washington look smart.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
JeffR wrote:
If it comes to war (looks like we are heading that way) do you support the attack on iran in advance? Let’s get on the record here.
Depends how it comes down. I think they are far, far more dangerous than Iraq ever was, but I will make no prejudgemens. Alot can happen in a year.[/quote]
No matter where you are on the subject of Iran, this could get interesting soon IMHO.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060404/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_missile
Iran Says It Can Handle Any Invasion
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
33 minutes ago
TEHRAN, Iran - A top Iranian military official said Tuesday the country can now defend itself against any invasion originating from outside the region ? a clear reference to the United States ? as it tested a second new radar-avoiding missile.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
bigflamer wrote:
I’d like to challenge our resident Bush haters to give the President credit for something. Anything. Let’s see if any of you Bush haters can sack up and be somewhat objective.
Even a Clinton hater such as myself realizes that he had some good qualities and managed to do at least do a few things right.
He makes the rest of Washington look smart.[/quote]
It’s a start.
I’ll take it!
pox wrote:
“Just those whose biggest “support” is mostly talk and retarded words on internet chat forums.”
The king of not reading responds anew!!!
Instead of acknowledging that you believe that Homeland Security has stopped the attacks (aka…people in homeland security have helped), you type the above sentence.
Anyway, not going to rehash how I think that there are brave people out of uniform that are serving and making valuable contributions.
Oh, I do substantially more than make fun of you and your pals.
I have to admit that I do enjoy pointing out your circular “logic.”
Have another 10,000 calories on me, Louis Cyr.
JeffR
[quote]JeffR wrote:
pox wrote:
“Just those whose biggest “support” is mostly talk and retarded words on internet chat forums.”
The king of not reading responds anew!!!
Instead of acknowledging that you believe that Homeland Security has stopped the attacks (aka…people in homeland security have helped), you type the above sentence.
Anyway, not going to rehash how I think that there are brave people out of uniform that are serving and making valuable contributions.
Oh, I do substantially more than make fun of you and your pals.
I have to admit that I do enjoy pointing out your circular “logic.”
Have another 10,000 calories on me, Louis Cyr.
JeffR
[/quote]
I don’t credit “Home Security” for much of anything, definitely not for us not being attacked. We weren’t attacked for years before 9/11. What makes you think that because 5 years have passed that they aren’t waiting for the heat to die down? According to testimony, they had been planning the WTC attack since 1993 or earlier. If it took them that long to get it all together, how stupid is the fool who thinks that because we haven’t been attacked in 5 years that this administration is the reason?
[quote]Professor X wrote:
JeffR wrote:
pox wrote:
“Just those whose biggest “support” is mostly talk and retarded words on internet chat forums.”
The king of not reading responds anew!!!
Instead of acknowledging that you believe that Homeland Security has stopped the attacks (aka…people in homeland security have helped), you type the above sentence.
Anyway, not going to rehash how I think that there are brave people out of uniform that are serving and making valuable contributions.
Oh, I do substantially more than make fun of you and your pals.
I have to admit that I do enjoy pointing out your circular “logic.”
Have another 10,000 calories on me, Louis Cyr.
JeffR
I don’t credit “Home Security” for much of anything, definitely not for us not being attacked. We weren’t attacked for years before 9/11. What makes you think that because 5 years have passed that they aren’t waiting for the heat to die down? According to testimony, they had been planning the WTC attack since 1993 or earlier. If it took them that long to get it all together, how stupid is the fool who thinks that because we haven’t been attacked in 5 years that this administration is the reason?[/quote]
If anything, the terrorists are busy killing Americans with coffee cans full of nails instead of having to come all the way to America to do it.
They probably don’t mind this war in Iraq at all. Its cheaper than coming here and making elaborate plans like they had to the first time.
Although I do believe that we’ve just been lucky. Madrid and London got hit, just as New York. I think that proves pretty well that no war has any effect on any urban attack- its just that they haven’t come back to hit America yet.
If the war really made us safer, wouldn’t London and Madrid not have gotten bombed?
[quote]JeffR wrote:
Time to ask another direct question that won’t be answered: Is anyone who supports the War, the Administration, and the troops, who isn’t in the armed forces a “chicken-hawk?”[/quote]
Sure. If you’ve been to war, then you are by definition not a chicken hawk. Chicken hawks love war… as long as it’s somebody else (or somebody elses’ family) who is fighting.
Now unless JeffR can’t pass the physical, I wonder why he talks the talk but doesn’t back it up. Maybe he can’t run a mile, if so then just say so.
Well, you’re right. Try to find something good that Bush has done, gee that’s a real head-scratcher. I could give him credit for promising to fight AIDS in Africa, but he didn’t follow through on his pledge.
Likewise on his pledge to help rebuild New Orleans… hasn’t followed through.
Energy independance from the middle east… didn’t follow through. In fact he retracted his statement the next day.
George Bush is a very good campaigner. I think he is terrible at actually running the governmnet, though.
By the way, re: Iran threat. Former UN chief nuclear weapons inspector Hans Blix says that Iran is at least 5 years away from being able to build a nuclear weapon. Bush didn’t listen to Blix on Iraq, and now we have ourselves a quagmire. I wonder if Bush will listen to Blix on Iran? I doubt it. He’s kind of pig-headed that way.
I don’t agree with him, but Christopher Hitchens makes a intellectually defensible argument for the war. He is not, I would say a chickenhawk.
He also admits that we have ourselves a genuine clusterfuck over there. The #/dead a day there is higher than in the civil wars in both El Salvador and Algeria.
Anyone who calls any critique of the war support for the enemy and pretends things are going wonderful in Iraq is however a chickenhawk, among other things.
You Americans are WEIRD.
It seems everyone wants to jump on the left or right bandwagon.
It seems you want to support your president whatever they do … and if you don’t you are some kind of traitor.
It is really, really weird behaviour and I don’t think you Americans realise it.
In other countries, if your leader does something stupid, you don’t rally behind them no matter what.
If your country goes to war, then “we are at war” is not an excuse to do other stupid things.
In Australia, if a party has a good idea you say “yeah THAT is a good idea” and if they have a bad idea, you say “that is a STUPID idea” - you don’t just follow the party no matter what. Some people do, but if you digress, if you say some of the things they do are stupid, nobody calls you a traitor. Or calls you a leftist, a greenie or whatever.
Is this some whacky leftover from McCarthyism? Witch hunting and finger pointing?
Why the hell do you do it?
Going to Iraq was stupid. The reasons they gave were deliberate lies and anyone who believes them is stupid. The ability to make a positive change over there is limited at best. You have wasted a tonne of money on a pointless expedition and the main, real reason was to feed the coffers of Cheny and friends via your taxes paying their companies, cash in hand, today, overcharging, war profiteering, you have all been royally had, and half of you don’t even seem to get it, even now. You still think it is about oil or democracy or something.
Democracy isn’t about one person one vote.
Democracy is about political parties with the force of arms to enforce rule of law, then the administration to manage the workforce to maintain basic and essential services, them employment, then it is one person one vote.
Without the basics the voting is a load of crap.
It is a noble thing to be throwing such efforts to create a stable Iraq but it is a tonne of work and why focus on Iraq when there are so many other countries that were in far worse shape in need of help.
Saddam was well contained before the war and the USA KNEW IT - and said it - he had nothing. And your top guys knew it. There was no “intelligence failure”, what a joke, do you really think your intelligence agencies are THAT stupid? The “now proven incorrect” intelligence was deliberately made up to give cause for war, which was for other agendas.
I say screw that, USA should have had the balls to say “we have no reason to attack but we are going in anyway because we want to” not make up pansy ass excuses to convince dimwitted public, because they are really trying to cover up the fact that they are going in for warprofiteering. But man, no need to lie about it.
Saddam, by the way, was trying to create the illusion that he had weapons to keep enemies such as Iran at bay. It is not rocket science to work out he was bluffing. Why remove him? you had him by the balls. He was bending over backwards to stave off attack. Why not cut the UN sanctions, keep hold of his balls, and push the country to development that way - much more sensible than take out the one man with enough iron will to keep the country stable when many of its population wanted to rip each other apart.
And now talk of Iran? It is obvious a lot of you have been fed the line that Iran is planning world domination through nuclear weapons or some shite. Like they are an imminent threat. For gods sake go learn something about Iran.
And N Korea. The land of no food and no electriciy. What a threat.
Sorry if I am so sarcastic it is just ridiculous. People keep posting propaganda as if it were fact, then when someone questions it, they call them a lefty. Or a Bush-basher. As they no doubt am calling me now, and fuming, ready to flame. But before you do, realise I am not.
And I just think it is weird how polarised in opinions people are in the U.S. and how people take sides with a political group and stick to it … maybe because there are so many people in the country? Or people want to feel part of a group?
Which is why the first post in this thread was so interesting and refreshing to see someone take another look at it all.
I hope one day we will have …
one person
one vote
on one issue at a time
for all issues
and no parties.
(and no lobbyists)
(and a standard of education that shows you actually understand the issues to some degree)
Man that ain’t ever going to happen.
[quote]Magarhe wrote:
You Americans are WEIRD.
It seems everyone wants to jump on the left or right bandwagon.
It seems you want to support your president whatever they do … and if you don’t you are some kind of traitor.
It is really, really weird behaviour and I don’t think you Americans realise it.
In other countries, if your leader does something stupid, you don’t rally behind them no matter what.
If your country goes to war, then “we are at war” is not an excuse to do other stupid things.
[/quote]
Good post. Many of us have been saying that for years. It makes no sense. It is like a football game instead of politics.
magrhe,
I fear the gap in thinking between you and I is far too large to surmount.
I read your post and I respectfully disagree with most of your assertions and conclusions.
It would take days (maybe impossible) to re-type and repost links to refute your assertions.
I can only encourage you to read the transcripts of saddam’s tapes. Boston Barrister and I have been updating them as they become available.
I wish you all the best.
JeffR
[quote]zarathus wrote:
Bush is neither Hitler nor is he Gandhi.
i try to avoid political discussions these days, as its just way to easy to fling rhetoric around (“uh, why is it that no one calls Hillary a carpet-bagging neoTrotskyian liberal”, “uh, they do, kind of everyday”)
these are the main features of the bush government, as i see them.
Bush is a delegate, CEO type of manager. Things like 9-11, or the bad information before the Iraq War, not concerning WMD but concerning the Iraqi political landscape, or Hurrican Katrina, are situations where the correct information was out there, but it was only possessed by certain people int he chain of command, and not by any person in full. That’s a reoccuring problem of infrastructure that apparently all the homeland security/FEMA reshuffling did not fix. Notice I’m not blaming Bush for molesting my children or for creating the designated hitter (though he did vote against the wild card when he was the Rangers president), but just that this is a partial failure that the administration doesn’t seem to concerned about.
Bush is as good as the people around him. The early Cheney/Powell/Rumsfeld/Rice/Ashcroft cadre, though i disagree with their politics, were very efficient and organized at what they did. The newer group around him doesn’t have near the experience nor the sense of mission that the “Vulcans” did. There aren’t any ideological disagreements among them, but they don’t really do anything either. You hear a lot less about Gonzalez as AG than you did about Ashcroft, and likewise you don’t hear about Steven Hadley at all (that’d be Rice’s padawan/apprentice, who is now NSA advisor). Rumsfeld and Cheney seem like tired versions of their old selves, bc they have been under attack for so long. Rice is the only remaining superstar, and she might run off to be the NFL commish.
Bush needs to stop saying, "well, no one could predict (Iraq’s post-war landscape/absence of WMD’s/Katrina levees breaching/the sun rising). It just makes him look dumb.
[/quote]
Good points.
W/r/t point 3, I think he overstates the case – it’s more about the perceived likeliehood of various contigencies. Some, like Iraq, were obvious miscalculations. Some, like the Katrina levees, were a low probability outcome given what people thought they knew (re: integrity of the levees) and what occurred (Katrina only a Cat 3 when it hit, didn’t directly hit NO, etc.).
But in his defense, it’s pretty difficult to discuss anything even slightly complex in the public arena. And he’s not the most elegant speaker for explaining complexities anyway.
W/r/t point 2, I think a lot of the folks who are left in the administration are fairly tired, and have developed a defensive, siege-oriented outlook. Definitely time for some new blood – but not necessarily just promoting from within. There are some very qualified folks out there who could give some new vitality to the cabinet.
[quote]What’s funny (or not too funny, you decide) is that while many of Bush supporters have voiced disapointment with the President on certain issues, I’ve yet to hear from someone who doesn’t support Bush give him credit for ANYTHING!
I’d like to challenge our resident Bush haters to give the President credit for something. Anything. Let’s see if any of you Bush haters can sack up and be somewhat objective.[/quote]
Hey, I know for a fact I’ve given him credit for a few things, and I’m pissed that nobody will give me credit for that.
Hell, I was criticized when I did, because “obviously his actions were politically motivated”.
George Bush thinks the federal government is bloated, wasteful, poorly-run, inefficient, and ineffective, and he’s doing his best to prove himself right.